EDITOR'S NOTE: Tomorrow and Monday will be no-newsletter days. We'll be back Tuesday, June 9. 'Til then: Stay well. Stay safe. Stay in! In the meantime, it's an odd sort of news day - with both inspiring and depressing news - followed by a Weekend diversion & Page-turners.

COVID-19 news continues: -- Moloney reports on Medellin, Colombia, pushing "'eco-city' aims using the coronavirus recovery to reach climate goals - one of dozens of cities around the world aiming to use a post-lockdown economic restart to simultaneously bootstrap environmental measures." -- Moser, Malzieu & Petkova of Foster + Partners' Urban Design team have spent the last few weeks "exploring how recent and fast moving developments in urban planning will affect and shape the future of cities worldwide." -- ThinkLab's Amanda Schneider takes a look at the first results of its Industry Impact Survey "measuring the fallout of COVID-19 for the design industry to help designers and design manufacturers move forward during these challenging times" - and invites you to participate.

Of protests, racism, and urban unrest - the industry responds: -- Michael Ford will launch the Hip Hop Architecture as Design Justice Competition with a webinar on Saturday - the challenge: "use hip hop lyrics as prompts to imagine spaces, places, and products for a Just City!" -- Gamolina dedicates Madame Architect's June Q&As honoring "the intersection of both the black and the LGBTQ+ communities" + The archive of interviews with an amazing line-up + "A Day With" series (all impressive Black women - all great reads!). -- Black Brazilian feminist Stephanie Ribeiro, whose "decision to study architecture was a naive one" in her "search for women and men like me: black architects and urban planners - race and gender can no longer be neglected in course curriculums" (the industry in general "needs more emphasis on women"). -- Beamon: "Dear White Architects, Be B.R.A.V.E, Not Sad. Love, NOMA": "If firms have seemed blind to violence against black citizens, they have also largely ignored the dismally small percentage of black architects" - join #DesignAsProtest in a Day of Action this Friday "to correct the design of spaces that dehumanize black people." -- Saffron ponders the destruction of buildings in Philly and elsewhere: "You can be appalled and heartbroken by our country's deadly racism, and yet still quake at what the damage to downtown portends - the destruction is devastating for the future of cities" -- Architect and educator Sekou Cooke reflects "on this current moment and what it says about Blackness and architecture in America - they are inextricably linked. Maybe there is a parallel to be drawn between the lack of Black perspectives within the architectural 'we' and the inability of the profession to find a suitable response to the current state of social justice." -- Architect and design justice advocate Bryan Lee, Jr. explains how "America's cities were designed to oppress. Architects and planners have an obligation to protect health, safety and - we've failed. Here is the start to a path forward - as much a call to action as it is an act of healing" (some comments are excruciating).

A weekend diversion & Page-turners: -- Hickman offers a sampling of "outdoor art spaces that are now open across the country for socially-distanced summer enjoyment." -- Wainwright x 2: He recalls his own grand adventure as he cheers Phnom Penh's "glorious architecture lovingly captured in a thrilling new book" that documents "more than 140 buildings - often for the first time. But can it survive a tidal wave of foreign investment"? -- He cheers Jethro Marshall's "Halls & Oats" that documents the "bleak, bulky yet strangely beautiful, village halls" that "are the beating heart of rural Britain - sheds full of civic ambition". (with intro by Sam Jacob). -- Moore mulls Maclean's "Circles and Squares: The Lives and Art of the Hampstead Modernists": "This was an exceptional bunch of people who deserve a more illuminating treatment than they get here." -- William O. Gardner: an excerpt from his "The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction" (very long, but worth the time). -- ICYMI x 2: ANN feature: Kristen Richards: Wild about Saffron: Revisiting Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates": New York City: a February Tuesday in Central Park. 55 degrees and sunny (originally posted February 21, 2005). -- ANN feature: FXCollaborative's Dan Kaplan offers a most eloquent "quarantine-induced assessment of downtown Manhattan - lingering on the rich detail, walking down streets that we neglected in busier times. Hopefully we'll emerge from our collective timeout recommitted to creating a more equitable and resilient city."

We savor the city, lingering on the rich detail, walking down streets that we neglected in busier times. It does feel like the proverbial music has stopped. How could it not? Hopefully we'll emerge from our collective timeout recommitted to creating a more equitable and resilient city.

The wickedly funny Sorkin, known to many as Comrade, was a social justice warrior. He maintained perpetual outrage in the course of writing 20 books and hundreds of articles, honing his invectives for gentrification, Disneyfication, waste, and conspicuous consumption. We have lost a polemicist who urged us toward the best of our architectural principles.

Designers must be at the forefront of ensuring that the spaces of the future embrace the lessons of 2020 without sacrificing beauty, comfort, and our shared need to come together safely and to foster human wellbeing.

The results of a survey of firm principals across the U.S. about the differences they envision in technology/working remotely, in markets and marketing, in work life and culture, and in society in our post-pandemic future.